Monday, October 18, 2004

a bit of wandering to warm-up

I am considering a longer, more direct, response to Jay and Thomas. For now, I posted a response on Bad With Titles. Follow the previous link to the discussion.

I like Jay's points. Thomas's, too. We each have different approaches to knowing an event. I am closer to Jay here. I think that Wittgenstein feared giving something to poetry he felt philosophy owned. A clarity that philosophers yearn for but cannot get to. A perspective on approaching propositions, maybe, I am not really sure.

When we talk about the craft of writing, we talk about much more than propositions. Language, in this talking, excedes its object; but it would be wrong to say that literary artists merely interpret reality (as is too often the case.) Many writers workshop under such a misapprehension, as well, and reduce lines into structures to be edited for comprehension.

Writing as Poetry is Breathing:
consider breathing as a mechanism for combining sense into compressed moments to be projected somewhere at some time. This allows authors to transmit and transfer space and time in a manner independent of history and dialectics--in other words, logic and ideology. And tradition, too. It allows for improvisation, which is not based in knowledge, rather in craft and something exceding both knowledge and craft we sometimes mystify and call genius.

Knowledge of concepts in the manner of truth-making always has an agenda that itself excedes the moment written about. Knowledge, then, is not static; its moving not historical. Though, knowledge can be historicized.

Writing as Poetry is working out--expelling--the "because it is" rationalizations. Poems or stories, Epics or novels, are objects themselves, maybe even concepts. Nevertheless, they are not static. They do not mean something for all readers. Knowledge is code for a word that strips action of act. Knowledge is nominalization. From the perspective of the liminal, knowledge is racist, sexist, colonialist--Empire. It is always determined by those who have social power. From the perspective of the artist, knowledge is a limit.

Knowledge is old school. The language of ONE is dying. Thankfully.

We have come to a moment where knowledge is useful as a mechanism. Concepts are machines.